Have you ever been really thirsty and gone to take a drink out of a water bottle only to discover that it’s really flavored water and not regular water? And it wasn’t at all what you expected?
That’s how I felt with this monitoring. I had it so set in my mind that all I was going to do was lay there and sleep and relax, maybe watch some movies, or read a book and it turned out to be something completely different.
Sleep deprivation is terrible. Let me just say that. After the second round of 21 hours awake and four hours of sleep, I was talking nonsense and I knew it. I have never been so tired. The one night they woke me up in the middle of my four hours of sleep to do a routine blood pressure check! Also, they try to induce seizures while you are under the monitor. So they bring in the strobe lights, played all sorts of different sounds, and they try to stress your heart and your brain in order to cause seizures.
Now, would you like to know the good parts?
-Friends can visit! This hospital does the monitoring in the ICU so technically you are only allowed to have 2 visitors at a time but I know at one point we had 6 people in the room. So many wonderful people came to visit me over the few days! My mom spent the days with me and Natalie spent the nights since she was working and that was the only time she could visit. Natalie had the worse end of the deal- she ended up being the one keeping me awake until 2am.
-Thank Jesus for the Olympics!!! You know, I NEVER get to watch the Olympics because I don’t have cable but because I was sitting in the hospital, I got to watch more than I ever have before!
-You get to wear pajama pants the whole time! I didn’t have to wear a hospital gown as long as I followed their standards for what you needed to wear (which, fortunately, I had read ahead of time) so I got to wear my own clothes.
-You can play with the monitor. Ok, probably shouldn’t have been doing this, but it didn’t take me long to find out that if I clenched my teeth together the EEG monitor would go crazy. I never got in trouble for it….
-I had one really awesome nurse! Actually, she was the night tech and she was amazing. That girl needs a raise. The first night she came in and found how tight my head was wrapped (it was cutting off the circulation to my ears) and she re-wrapped the whole thing. She explained things to me which no one else had taken the time to do and I am so thankful for her!
(You are currently reading a post in a series called The2016Story. If you have jumped in in the middle and would like to start at the beginning, click HERE.)
Scribblings of a Sojourner 